Rotten Tomatoes Expands Into TV Reviews

Rotten Tomatoes‘ film recommendations are often hit and miss, so the question is how much stock will be put in the much more nebulous world of TV series reviews? The aggregator site, acquired by Warner Bros in 2011 and run through the social movie site Flixster, will launch TV Zone beginning tomorrow (parts of the service will go live this evening) offering reviews of full seasons of primetime scripted TV series. The parameters for a good score will be similar to the site’s movie rules: to be “Certified Fresh” a series must have 60% positive reviews, and the same cutoffs apply. But film and TV are different and there will be growing pains on how to apply the site’s processes to the TV side. “We’re doing reviews at the season level the way most critics do”, editor-in-chief Matt Atchity tells Deadline. “We’re still discussing how to handle [individual show] recaps and how that will impact the Tomatometers”. At launch, the site will provide coverage of “all the reviews we can find” for the previous four years of a show. In cases of longer-running shows like The Office, the site will go back to the beginning of the series and work forward. Initially there won’t be coverage of reality TV — “we don’t want to bite off more than we can chew”, Atchity says. He says plans are to staff up on the TV side but much of that depends on the expansion’s success.